The sergeant and his team were paying out the last of the line and preparing to stand back as Psyche winched the black cable aboard.
‘Yon bastard’s away wi’ the chopper then, sir?’ enquired the sergeant.
‘Yes,’ answered his commanding officer, who until today had never been heard to swear, ‘the bastard is.’
The walkie-talkie buzzed angrily and Tom picked it up only to drop it again at once. Sometime during the last few moments, his fingers had gone completely numb. He beat his hand against his thigh and found that it was equally insensible. It was a moment or two before he could pick up the walkie-talkie and hold it to his face.
‘Christ, Tom, what is going on over there? Are you all right?’
‘It’s pretty cold here, Richard. And we’re stuck. Didn’t you see the chopper lift off?’
‘No I did not! Right. We’ve got the forward line aboard and we’re drifting in fast. Can you take care of the stern one or shall I sort something out from this end?’
The cold was really starting to get inside Tom now. It was fogging up his brain and making that section of it still functioning fill with waves of agony from every single joint in his shaking body. He gritted his teeth. ‘No, it’s OK, Richard. We’ll fire it aboard.’
‘Right. Do that. Then just hang on. I’ll have a team of men from Psyche ready to come down there and get you off the instant we’re in position.’
‘Right. Understood.’
He didn’t bother switching off the machine, he just dropped it and watched it skitter down the steely curve of running ice. He staggered over to the second group, falling twice and arriving on his hands and knees, though they were only three hundred metres distant.
The great stern of the supertanker swung in towards them with nerve-stretching rapidity. Tom was torn between wanting them to hurry it up and extreme concern as to what would happen if they hit the ice too hard. As the rear of the ship, standing high because she was running only in ballast and augmented by five storeys of bridgehouse, closed towards the sheer cliffs, it created a wind tunnel which none of the men involved had counted upon; the mounting gusts of the squall rushing down upon them from the west were forced relentlessly into the narrow channel, increasing their speeds pitilessly towards hurricane strength.
‘FIRE!’ yelled Tom at last, not when ordered to, or even when he thought Psyche was in the correct position, just when he could take the power of the terrible gale no longer. The rocket whirled away down the wind. ‘Leave that!’ he ordered in a hoarse scream. ‘Get up to the back of the cave! Quickly!’
He led the way himself, making the last few metres up to the piled survival equipment on his hands and knees, his bright blue uniform beret long gone.
Richard realised how serious matters had become only when it was almost too late to do anything about it. It was the firing of the stern rocket line that alerted him, for neither he nor Psyche’s equipment, or her captain, the Guyanese Peter Walcott, had thought her in the correct position yet. Richard had been on the bridge, wrapped in deep concentration, completely unaware of what was happening other than that the helicopter had leaped off the foam-washed reef, certain only that the great ship was behaving very strangely and at a loss to explain exactly why.
The news of the fired line sent him out onto the bridge wing and into the unrelenting grip of the freak wind — a wind which only blew here and below, where Psyche’s instruments could not even tell of its existence. He ran back onto the bridge in a breathless burst of action. ‘Captain Walcott! Our movement is causing a severe intensification of the wind between our port side and the cliffs. It must be coming through force ten out there now. I would like to lower the port lifeboat at once and go after the men on the ice before they simply get blown away.’
‘Of course, Captain. Number One, take a team and help the captain. You watch yourself though. I know what hurricanes can do!’
The two officers ran down through the companionways as the captain’s voice broadcast orders around them. No sooner had they reached the correct deck than the lifeboat crew arrived beside them. Between urgent gasps for breath, Richard explained the situation and gave his orders. They all nodded various understanding and burst out into the tiny, vicious hurricane.
Richard was the only one really expecting it and he was the only one not literally staggered by the power of it. But the others soon fought their way into position and released the automatic davits of the lifeboat, allowing it to swing down and out. Richard and the first officer scrambled in unhandily through the top hatch as the solid vessel jerked viciously against its blocks and the winch hooks groaned to let it go. Two of the team followed them as quickly as they could while the last two held the tricing-in pendants and bowsing lines until Richard ordered them to let go. The winches whirred and clanked. The boat began to tumble out and down, the gravity brakes refusing to let the wind tear it free of the falls. One gust swung it in to batter against the buffers on the ship’s side and everyone aboard tumbled around like stones in a huge maraca. Then their wild ride stopped abruptly. The hull jerked into motion three more times, falling less than a metre each time, and then it stopped for good, its keel just kissing the surface of the water and the strong curve of its lower port side thumping against the steep shore of the ice.
Tom Snell had no idea that anyone would — could — be coming to his rescue. The moment he had got the second team crouching together enjoying some kind of protection from the bundle of survival equipment, he was off again, still on hands and knees, to check on Sergeant Dundas and his men. Well before he had suffered the full three hundred metres of wind-ravaged ice, he saw that Dundas had led the small contingent up to the only promise of shelter, the low back of the cave, and here they were huddled together, wedged between the curves of floor and roof, with their backs to the wild whirl of the wind.
It was only now that Tom remembered the glimpse he had had of the cobalt-throated caves less than a hundred metres further on along the ridge. He battered on Dundas’s numb back until he had the soldier’s full attention and then he began to lead the bedraggled little group down the slippery beach of ice. As they moved, the curve between floor and roof began to widen and the back wall along which they were moving rose from two metres to three in height, then four, five and six. The cliff was all but vertical above them by the time they reached the mouth of the nearest cave. They were on a tiny ledge now, a mere metre and a half of gently sloping ice, then a cliff lunging down into the sea at least as sheer as the one above their heads and five times its height in depth. The wind showed no sign of relenting and was doing its best to push them off, so they had no choice and, consequently, no hesitation.
Tom turned, thinking somewhere distantly, no doubt, that he should see his men in first, like a courteous host, but as soon as he faced the wind he knew with bone-deep certainty that to hesitate was to die. Leading from the front as always, therefore, he stepped through the portal first. He took one crouching step on safe, firm ice through a blessed calm of solid-walled windlessness, then a second round a sudden twist in the low, tunnel-like cave — just enough to take him beyond the immediate sight of the next man following. Then he took a third step into an abyss. He pitched forward and down so suddenly, he didn’t even have time to call out. The second man, as disorientated as his commanding officer by the sudden windless silence, took the same steps and met the same fate. As did the third.